Chương 4
Arthur lowered his voice.
“Sarah, your husband broke into my private records, threatened me, and showed up at the house in an unstable condition. Whatever Maisie thinks she saw, she was freezing and terrified.”
“She said Mom locked them outside.”
Eleanor’s mouth trembled.
Arthur answered for her. “The girls were never at the house.”
Mercer looked at him.
Arthur heard his own mistake. Sarah watched him try to retrieve it.
“I mean before David brought them there,” he said.
“You told police David came alone,” Mercer said.
Crane stepped forward. “My client will not answer further questions in a hospital corridor.”
“My daughter was at your back door,” Sarah said to Arthur. “She heard Ruby crying. She heard David in the garage.”
“Sarah.”
“What did you do?”
Arthur’s expression softened. It was the expression he had used when she was sixteen and caught him reading her email, when she was twenty-five and discovered he had called her landlord about a late rent payment, when she was thirty and he had rewritten the toast David planned to give at their wedding because Arthur thought it sounded unsophisticated.
“Your husband is sick,” he said. “He has been spiraling for months. You know that.”
A hot, humiliating part of Sarah recognized the invitation. Agree, and the world would become orderly again. David would be the difficult one. Arthur would hire attorneys, pay the bills, call the right doctors. Eleanor would cry privately. The girls would heal. Nobody would ask Sarah why she had dismissed her husband’s warnings.
“You fired him three weeks ago,” she said.
“Because he was stealing proprietary information.”
“Was he right about the Hartwell accounts?”
Crane turned toward Arthur.
It was the first time the attorney looked genuinely surprised.
Arthur’s jaw tightened.
“Who told you that name?”
“David.”
“He’s conscious?”
Eleanor made a small sound.
Sarah looked at her father’s face and saw something she had never seen there before. Not fear exactly. Calculation under pressure. The numbers no longer balancing.
Mercer spoke quietly to the second officer, who approached Arthur.
“Mr. Vance, we need you to come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at this time.”
“Then I’m staying with my family.”
“The hospital has asked that you leave this floor.”
“I am the girls’ grandfather.”
“You are also part of an active investigation involving their injuries.”
Arthur looked at Sarah.
“Tell them.”
Two words. A lifetime of training inside them.
Sarah glanced through the window of Maisie’s room. The nurse with the clipboard sat beside the bed. Maisie was watching the doorway.
“No,” Sarah said.
Arthur’s face became still.
Crane guided him toward the elevator. The second officer followed. Arthur did not look away from Sarah until the doors closed between them.
Eleanor remained.
For several seconds, she seemed not to realize that Arthur had gone. Then she reached for Sarah’s hand.
Sarah stepped back.
Her mother’s arm dropped.
“Was Ruby crying when you locked the door?” Sarah asked.
Eleanor’s eyes filled.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“He said they would be safer outside.”
“In a blizzard?”
“For a minute. He said only for a minute.”
Sarah’s body moved before she made a decision. She caught the front of Eleanor’s coat in both hands and pushed her against the wall. The sound was softer than she expected, wool and breath and the flat tap of a shoulder blade against painted drywall.
Mercer was there immediately.
“Mrs. Anderson.”
Sarah released her mother.
Eleanor did not defend herself. She stood against the wall with her coat pulled crooked and tears traveling silently into the lines beside her mouth.
“You put that key in Maisie’s purse,” Sarah said.
Eleanor shook her head once, then nodded, as if both answers had been waiting.
“Arthur said David had stolen it. He said it needed to be found with him.”
“With David.”
“With his things.”
“So you chose my daughter’s purse.”
“I didn’t know he would put David in the garage.”
“You locked them outside.”
“Arthur said he needed them out of the way.”
The honesty of the phrase made Sarah recoil.
Out of the way.
Ruby was three. She still called spaghetti “pasketti” and believed all automatic doors opened because she whispered to them. Maisie slept with the bathroom light on but denied being afraid of the dark. Out of the way.
Mercer turned to Eleanor. “Mrs. Vance, you need to stop talking until I advise you of your rights.”
Eleanor looked at Sarah instead.
“I was going to let them back in.”
“When?”
“After Arthur moved the car.”
Mercer’s expression hardened. “What car?”
Crane came back through the elevator doors alone.
“Eleanor,” he said sharply. “Do not say another word.”
She flinched.
The movement was so familiar that Sarah almost felt sympathy. She remembered her mother dropping a wineglass during a dinner party when Sarah was eleven. Arthur had not raised his voice. He had merely looked at Eleanor until she apologized to every guest individually for startling them.
Sarah had mistaken silence for gentleness because Arthur rarely shouted.
Crane stepped between Eleanor and Mercer. “She is represented by separate counsel as of now.”
“You represent both of them?” Mercer asked.
“Not after this conversation.”
Eleanor wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
Sarah stared at the red line across her palm.
“That’s not from cooking,” she said.
Eleanor covered it.
Crane led her toward the elevator.
This time, Eleanor looked back.
“I thought Maisie could open the gate,” she said.
Then the doors closed.
Sarah returned to the girls’ room because there was nowhere else in the world she could stand.
Maisie had heard enough to know something had happened. Her face had tightened with the effort of listening.
“Did Grandma come?”
“Yes.”
“Is she sorry?”
Sarah removed her wet coat and draped it over the back of a chair.
“I think she is.”
“Does that make it okay?”
“No.”
May you like
Maisie looked relieved by the answer.
The blue-gloved nurse adjusted Ruby’s blanket. “Her temperature is improving,” she said. “That’s good.”
